Another mafioso role for me. This time I played the head of Smoke Enders, using Mafia techniques to make people quit smoking. Dino De Laurentiis, the producer, had seen me impersonate wise guys in other movies, and he swore I was Italian. "No, I'm Jewish.""Unh-huh. You gotta be Italian, you got every gesture. Maybe your grandfather?" "No, my grandfather was Jewish, from Russia." "His father?" He simply would not take my word for it.

—Alan King on Cat's Eye (1985), Name Dropping

Beverly D'Angelo: I'm a very, very, very Italian girl. My grandmother was a letter-bride, came over when she was 15; my grandfather came over, built railroads; I went to school in Italy; I speak Italian; I lived there '81-'85; my first husband...I'm as Italian as you can get, and I have never gotten offered or even considered for an Italian part! Because I don't act like what everybody thinks an Italian person acts like! Cathy Moriarty: I'm not even Italian; I'm full-blooded Irish and I always get cast as Italian. D'Angelo: I would KILL for an Italian role!

I started out on Broadway in the original production of Yentl and won awards for it, and then when the move came out with Barbra Streisand they said, 'We wanna do it authentically, we wanna put all-Jewish people in the cast'....I went, 'I just did it for a year on Broadway!', and they said,'We don't care! You're Irish-Catholic!'

Chris: To be fair, itís pretty understandable why Liu Kang would think that Raiden was a fraud, since most Japanese thunder gods donít tend to look like French dudes. Matt: Raiden was born in the United States, educated in the Swiss Alps, and then moved to Japan to become a god. Makes perfect sense.

Most of the reason for the mockery is for Nic Cage and his over the top Italian accent. 'BELLA BAMBINA AT TWO O CLOCK!' You know, I donít begrudge an actor who knows he canít do a dignified job with an accent and just speaks English. In fact, I admire him. Itís when we get attempts like this that we really laugh. I kept expecting Nic to exclaim 'Thatís a spicy meat-a-ball!' at the end of every line.

They shouldíve known that Aloha wouldnít end well as soon as Emma Stone was cast as a woman named Allison Ng who is a quarter Hawaiian, a quarter Chinese and a quarter Swedish. The Swedish part must have eaten the Chinese and Hawaiian parts.

David Carradine is Elvis of kung fu, having the honorable distinction of helping to pioneer western martial arts movies only by virtue of blatant racism. He is most famous for playing the lead in the 1970s kung fu serial, creatively titled Kung Fu, winning the part from Bruce Lee, even though Lee helped create the show for the sole purpose of acting in it. Apparently no one told Bruce that at that time Chinese people were considered 'too Chinese' to play Chinese people.

I will say one thing negative about Boreanazís otherwise stellar performance, and that is his Irish accent needs some more work and is barely comprehensible at times (although this isnít entirely untrue of Irish enunciation).

Patrick Stewart is British, Jean-Luc Picard is French. That said, heís played straightforwardly in an English accent, and the constant sense is that Gene Roddenberry may have had a somewhat hazy sense of the fact that there was a material difference.

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